For the audiophile who has everything

For sale: More music than you can listen to in a lifetime. Starting price: $3 million. At least it's organized.

March 07, 2008|By Sean D. Hamill, SPECIAL TO THE TRIBUNE

ROSS TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Like the enormous record collection he's been trying to sell for a month from his Record-Rama store here just north of Pittsburgh, Paul Mawhinney can seem outlandish, even difficult to believe, like some audiophile version of P.T. Barnum.

"This is the greatest music collection in the world," Mawhinney said without a hint of doubt about the 3 million-plus albums, singles, CDs, tapes, and 8-tracks he has spent a lifetime collecting and now wants to sell for at least $3 million.

"This doesn't exist anywhere else. The Library of Congress tells me I have twice as much as they do, and mine are all organized," he said. "You tell me what you want, and I can go to it in a minute. With this many records, that's impossible to do anywhere else in this country."

The way many experts in the field see it, Mawhinney can back up his lofty claims. He does have one of the best collections in the world, experts say, and he does own more commercial records than the Library of Congress.

Want to buy that obscure New York Philharmonic album? He has it.

The one Muppets recording you're missing? That too.

The record of your favorite college band that never made it out of the college town? He probably has one of those as well.

Don't even worry about Madonna, the Beatles, or Marvin Gaye. There are boxes full.

EBay sale fell through

"I can't remember not knowing about the Record-Rama collection," said Gene DeAnna, head of the recorded sound section of the Library of Congress. "It's clearly one of the largest commercial record collections anywhere, and one of the best. And his catalog [database] is phenomenal. It's the most complete collection of 45s anywhere."

Now Mawhinney, 68, wants to sell it all -- intact -- to the highest bidder. That's in part because of his failing health and also to "have something to leave to my family" of three grown children and five grandchildren.

He tried to make a sale last month on eBay, the online auction house, in a sale that attracted worldwide interest, at least in part because Mawhinney tagged it "The World's Greatest Music Collection."

But when the auction ended Feb. 20, with a high bid of just over $3 million, and more than 200,000 online page views -- an astonishing number for an eBay auction -- it didn't take long for Mawhinney and his agent to realize the bid was fraudulent.

"The winning bidder wrote back to me that he never even heard about this. He said he was the victim of identity theft," said J. Paul Henderson, a former radio deejay who is Mawhinney's agent and friend.

Now, Mawhinney is talking with three prospective private buyers, whom he has given until Tuesday to agree on a negotiated price. If none of them agree by then, he said he'll relist the collection on eBay.

Mawhinney's caveat is that he wants to keep the collection together, as an archive, and plans to spend time explaining his cataloging system.

16,000-square-foot home

"I'm gonna be the curator-at-large no matter where this goes because one of my obligations is to try to keep this all together, because this is my life's work."

Mawhinney almost sold it all in 1999 to the online retailer CDNOW for $28.5 million, but the financially struggling company was eventually bought and is now run by Amazon.

Mawhinney's life's work is squeezed into a wonderfully cluttered, bunkerlike, 16,400-square-foot basement beneath a strip mall in suburban Pittsburgh, filled by 30 8-foot-high bookcases and loaded with records and CDs. At the end of every row, and along all the walls, are boxes stuffed with duplicates of the most popular records, and stacks of unsorted 78s.

At the front of that space, separate from the archive where he sold to collectors, is the retail section, where he sold the duplicates of his collection at retail prices -- a dual business that generated $2 million to $4 million in annual sales in the good years in the late 1980s and early '90s.

Mawhinney bought his first record, the Frankie Laine single "Jezebel," in 1951, when he was 12 and growing up on Pittsburgh's north side, the son of a bus driver. But it was hearing Elvis Presley for the first time a few years later that really triggered his love of music -- and inspired him to join the Army, like his hero, Elvis.

From storage to store

After he got out of the Army and spent a few years running a restaurant and selling paper products, his wife, Collette, tired of the 160,000 records he had collected in their home. She told him to get rid of them or, better yet, open a store.

So, in 1968 he did and began acquiring collections, castoffs from distributors, libraries from radio stations, which "always had at least one Elvis Christmas album," he said of the rare album that sells for $700 each. He has 17 copies.

Others may contend their collections are of similar quality or size, but Mawhinney "was one of the few who knew what he had" because he had cataloged almost everything, said Tom Surman, a former vice president of promotion for RCA Records who is a friend of Mawhinney's.

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Collection is also a museum

If owning the best record collection in a world of MP3 players sounds like being the owner of the best buggy repair shop after Henry Ford started selling cars, Gene DeAnna of the Library of Congress notes that most of the music of the 20th Century is still on vinyl.

A Library of Congress survey found that only about 14 percent of all of the music recorded before 1962 is in print today, and collections like Paul Mawhinney's contain music that might otherwise be lost forever.